weekend woes

hey everyone

well, what a miserable weekend! first off, William has been running a bit of a temperature. Michele, with love and medicine, has got it down to normal, i am glad to say. especially as this allows me to go off and vent my anger at two of the most incompetent, useless companies ever to come into being.

first off, those "new and exciting next generation of telecommunications" buffoons that are NeoTel. my regular readers will recall our initial, as it were, problem with them (posted indeed initially under the title Completely Useless Neo Tel Service) was that someone wished to cancel their service with them and, due to a typo on their side, it ended up being us cancelled. twice.

having thought that the matter was resolved at last, i was surprised to find that on Friday i could not connect. i contacted them and they announced that they had been experiencing a "general network failure" and that no one could connect. i figured fair enough.

Lies!

by Saturday when i called still unable to connect, they said there was no problem at all, and we had been disconnected due to the matter mentioned above and posted elsewhere! just how incompetent are they?

here's a quick pic of their rather large building, not too far from where we live.





it is indeed one big building, so big in fact you would have thought that at least one competent staff member would be in there at any given time. alas, it seems to be the case that such thoughts are misguided and misplaced.

as per the initial problem, the people working there assured us that "nothing could be done" and that we would remain disconnected.

Lies!

the last time they disconnected us, we had to go without service for a week. the next time we had to, reluctantly, put up with no service for the weekend. this time, by my word, i was insisting that they put us back on straight away. i advised them to avoid an awful lot of silly bother for themselves in regards of this situation and switch us on immediately, but they were insistent that "nothing could be done".

it's odd, however, that when you have the details, in particular the phone number, of senior managers of Neo Tel, you can get switched back on more or less straight away. we didn't wish to disturb anyone unnecessarily over the weekend, but we weren't going to be inconvenienced again because of their incompetent, amateur approach.

a call was placed, and, wouldn't you know, we got to experience the words of their rather large new billboard.





i can only trust that disturbing the weekend of at least two senior managers at Neo Tel convinces them to stop messing about with our account (or the service to anyone else, for that matter) and just get on with it. why exactly Neo Tel insist on having a "call centre" is beyond me, to date i do not recall anyone there being able to do anything or give even the most basic of advice.

their policy of terminating services - without notification - on Fridays is also a curious one. we are not special enough to be the only ones who get the benefit of their inability to manage their own service, so why just switch things off when, apparently, "nothing can be rectified" for the next two days must cause them some trouble. well, as said above, we found a way to make sure that they can indeed undo their mistakes on Saturdays at 9pm if that's the way they wish to do it.

in the mean time, as a gesture of goodwill, i have redesigned their logo for them, adding in a much needed slogan so all potential clients know what to expect.





our joy at having the service back, by the clock, lasted no more than 9 or so hours, thanks to the undisputed kings of incompetence. yes, the very worst company in the world, City Power and their chums Eskom struck on Sunday morning.

we were rather confused by the power going off at 7:30am. i phoned the "help line" and, after several minutes of too loud, too awful music i got to hear that this was all a "planned and announced outage" due to maintenance, with the power returning at 2pm

Lies!





first off, where the hell is it that this was "announced"? there was nothing in any newspaper, not a word on any news bulletin (although, of course, if it doesn't happen in Sandton or where any of their awful presenters live then the likes of the horrid 702 do not report it), and certainly no notifications sent out.

secondly, 2pm? at 3pm when there was no power and i called they said "maybe 6pm". at 6pm the phones simply weren't being answered any more, and it finally came back on at 6:30pm.

i thus spent a wonderful Valentines Day driving backwards and forth to the folks to fill up flasks with hot water for William, as well as doing my best to keep James entertained and make sure Michele and William were OK. nice one, thanks for that. still, on my travels, i noticed that your nice big building had all the lights blazing. on a Sunday lunchtime.





South Africa gets an awful lot of bad press, some of it justified some of it an over-reaction. i am, however, beginning to understand why so many people (of all races and backgrounds, thank you) opt to leave. the events above are not isolated; they are becoming all too common. if the average guy can't live a normal life in so far as paying bills and getting headaches and blood pressure instead of the services expected, what's the point in hanging around, exactly? the majority of infrastructure is falling to pieces; if a new company like Neo Tel can't even have some sort of idea of how to do things from the start and someone sat on the money and resources of the power company can't work out exactly what's going on with their service, what hope of anything?

i really hope your weekend went a good deal smoother than ours.


try to remain, as hard as it is sometimes, being excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!